Corporate data are increasingly mobile, distributed, and prolific. Data are routinely taken out of physically secured facilities to accommodate workers who travel or have flexible working habits. Data are also distributed geographically as corporations' business interests take them into other cities, states, and countries. Data are prolific in both the rate at which they are generated and in the multi-media formats in which they can be presented. All of these forces drive the evolution of new storage media, higher bandwidth subsystems, and network-connected storage that require that data be protected both while in transit and while at rest.
Data-at-rest (DAR) encryption technology prevents the unauthorized use of data stored on lost or stolen storage devices, thereby preventing these data from being spread on the Internet or other networks. DAR encryption acts as an automated and quick response mechanism to prevent the inevitable loss and theft of storage devices from becoming the loss and theft of the data stored on those devices.
One of the challenges of protecting data stored on various storage devices associated with a computing platform is that encryption technologies and key management strategies differ depending upon the entity performing the encryption. Storage hardware may have built-in encryption capabilities that are unique to the storage hardware vendor, thereby requiring use of the storage hardware vendor's tools to access the data. Software-based encryption requires different key generation and management services than hardware-based encryption and may therefore require use of the software vendor's tools to access the software-encrypted data. Planning for key recovery and migration of data in the event of theft or loss may therefore require use of a number of different vendors' tools to protect and/or recover all of the data associated with a computing platform.